Analysis on the Policy Outcomes of Environmental Protests in Urban China

With the development of rapid economic growth, environmental protection became a worldwide trend in recent decades as well as emerging environmental protests. The outcomes of this kind of popular protest in the political process varied among developed and developing economies and democratic and authoritarian countries. In the theoretical view of social movement outcome approach, all of political, cultural, and social outcomes have been discussed respectively. Through studying two typical NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) protests in urban China, we find out that all of three social movement outcomes need the approach of policy change outcome to reach contentious goal successfully. Both typical NEMBY protests in Kunming and Shanghai cities also show an epoch of China in its development of civic capacity and demonstrate environmental protests are able to overcome the obstacles of mobilizing collective actions to challenge the determinant decisions of the governmental authority. Lastly, environmental protests that happened in urban China have been playing a key role to force local government to change policy-making. However, indeed it is a double-edged sword through changing governmental policy-making on city's NIMBY facilities. As the most important one among all kinds of social movements, environmental protest outcomes with policy change linking the case studies show that increased social space for civic action is creating a new form social movement. The characteristic with embeddedness developed in association with the China's semi-authoritarian regime.